Friday 24 August 2007 19.04 EDT
First published on Friday 24 August 2007 19.04 EDT

Oh dear. What a terrible trade we work in. Blue Peter is bent. Five is a faker. Richard and Judy's competitions give a glorious new meaning to their slogan "You say, we pay". A BBC press conference screens a trailer misrepresenting the Queen. Channel Four's Born Survivor Bear Grylls turns out to need room service. Even Children in Need and Comic Relief turn out to be guilty of something worse than insufferable smugness. And that great alpha male Gordon Ramsay can't even catch his own fish.

Now, some of these so-called scandals are just nonsense. Others will blow over. Some are wilful misunderstanding.

But this needs saying, and it needs saying quite clearly. There is a problem. Potentially, it is a very big problem. It has the capacity to change utterly what we do, and in the process to betray the people we ought to be serving. Once people start believing we're playing fast and loose with them routinely, we've had it.

Let me say right now that some of the things of which we stand accused are contemptible. I can see no circumstances at all under which you can justify defrauding the public on a premium rate phone line. In fact, I can't quite see why there aren't grounds for prosecution. And it seems to me things haven't been much helped by they way they've been handled. We've had the preposterous spectacle of some of the most senior figures in broadcasting running around like maiden aunts who've walked in on some teenage party, affecting shock and disbelief at what they've heard. It simply won't wash for senior figures in the industry to blame our troubles on an influx of untrained young people: the ITV Alzheimer's documentary and the trailer for the series about the Queen were made by a couple of the most venerable figures in the business.

When I was asked to give this lecture, I thought I knew what I wanted to talk about. It was about the relationship between the media and political life. And then, a few weeks later, Tony Blair nicked my subject, in a speech in which he talked about us being a pack of feral beasts. Blair's focus was on news, but what he identified as the cause of the trouble applies right across television. In a nutshell, he defined the source of the problem as hugely increased competition, which makes impact by far the most important consideration in broadcasting, because impact gives competitive edge.

So what we need now is a manifesto - a clear, unambiguous statement of belief. Before we can do that we need to recognise how the world in which we operate has changed.

First, as everyone knows, in the past quarter century we've gone from three television channels to hundreds. The truth is this: the more television there is, the less any of it matters. We have already entered a world in which, though sites like YouTube, anyone can publish anything. It's removed the magic from production. The more familiar people become with the medium, the more sceptical they're likely to be.

Second, once the audience is able to watch television at a time and in a style of its own choosing, the authority of the broadcaster is immediately undermined. It is a subtle but significant change in the balance of power.

Third, the decline of almost all audiences means that no one programme, or organisation any longer has the natural authority of dominance.

Fourth, the crisis of confidence in television reflects the crisis of trust in politics: the old "we know best" culture - in which producers affected a patrician concern to enlighten the poor dumb creatures who were their viewers won't wash any longer.

But the most important change, it seems to me, is the philosophy that underpins what we do. There are too many people in this industry now whose answer to the question "what is television for?" is "to make money".There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the restructuring of the industry, which the Tories began and Labour has continued. The BBC was big and lumbering and arrogant, and plenty of the independents are lean, quick and creative. But the dynamic shifted. Those reforms also removed from ITV obligations to produce all sorts of programming which was once deemed to be a public good. Instead of great regional companies with distinguished records - Granada Television being a case in point - we have one amorphous mass. Then came the retreat from children's programming. One by one the public service requirements are being abandoned. Given the chance, who seriously doubts that ITV would abandon much of its regional broadcasting? I'm not really blaming ITV: once you treat television as if it's no different to running a fast-food empire, of course commercial judgments rule.

There has been a catastrophic, collective loss of nerve.One of New Labour's tricks was to commission polling evidence and focus groups to find out what people wanted. And then to offer it to them. Television has gone much the same way. Too often it seems that the people at the top of this industry no longer ask themselves what they ought to be using this uniquely powerful medium for. Instead of seeking to enlighten the audience, they set out to second-guess them.In his speech Blair admitted that a vast amount of the work of his government - perhaps too much - had been devoted to handling the media. He justified this by claiming it was because the media pays little attention to what goes on in places like parliament because we're obsessed by impact. In a choice between impact and accuracy, he said, impact wins. He went on to accuse us of using extravagant language: every problem's a crisis, policies don't run into difficulty, they end up in tatters. We see everything in black and white, and have given up separating fact from comment. "We are," he said, "all being dragged down by the way that the media and public life interact."

Now we could despatch some of these ideas quite quickly. We do not need to take seriously complaints about the marginalising of parliament from a Prime Minister who could hardly be bothered to turn up there much of the time. Nor need we concern ourselves with complaints about trivialisation of cabinet government from a man whose cabinet meetings could last less time than an edition of Ready Steady Cook. We do not need lectures about cynicism from an administration which employed people who believed that September 11 was a good day to bury bad news. Most of all, we do not need homilies about destroying people's reputations from an administration on whose watch Dr David Kelly was driven to suicide.

But I found the media's response to the Blair challenge, and particularly the response of the television industry, pretty depressing. Hardly anyone engaged with the substance of the criticisms - our triviality, our short-sightedness, our preoccupation with conflict. The immediate and almost universal reaction was to utter a blanket plea of "not guilty".

The big question is the one of legitimacy. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wonder about what I do. It comes in the form of a question: "And who, precisely, do you presume to speak for? Who ever voted for you?

There was plenty wrong with Blair's speech. To talk about the media being "feral beasts" was weird, because, as we all know, feral either means untamed, or it means to run wild, as if they were once tamed. But surely we ought to be untamed? The alternative is to be some sort of poodle.

What was wrong with Blair's speech was that he went for the Independent. This was a pathetic target. It was also foolish, because if any paper chooses not to be part of the pack, it's the Indie. But to suggest that just because he picked the wrong example the whole complaint is - as Alastair Campbell would put it - "bollocks" or "crap" or something, won't do. Something has changed - and changed profoundly - in the way that public life works.

The relationship between the media and politics is, Blair tells us, increasingly fractious. I'm not really sure this is something we need to worry too much about: our responsibility is to the citizen. I genuinely believe there ought to be a chasm between journalists and politicians. (I do not, incidentally - and I am heartily sick of this quote of being attributed to me - think politicians are all lying bastards. I never said it. And they're not.)

But we ought also to acknowledge one enormous blind spot. There is a tacit understanding between the two sides that does no one any favours. There are three parties here: the politicians who govern, or want to govern, second, the media, and the third, the public. It is a very odd characteristic of this relationship that while the media and politicians feel free to criticise each other, neither has the guts to criticise the public, who are presumed never to be wrong.

One very small example. Last April, GMTV tackled the case of a Yorkshire man who needed medical treatment to prevent the loss of an eye. The treatment was then unavailable on the NHS. The man was interviewed down the line, at the end of which one presenter turned to the other and said, "It's just wrong, it's as simple as that. Sometimes you just have to say that." His co-presenter tutted, "He's an ex-serviceman too."

The presenters were only repeating what you could hear across the land. What no one ever says when covering these stories is that rationing is the inevitable consequence of the fact that people won't pay more in taxes. Let none of us for a moment suggest the British people might be hypocritical or even thoughtless. No danger of that at GMTV. No danger, really, of it anywhere.

Would it not be a lot more sophisticated - and honest - to acknowledge sometimes that things may be more complicated than they appear? The problem is that all news programmes need to make noise. The need has got worse, the more crowded the market has become. We clamour for the viewers' attentionand a sort of expectation inflation sets in. So the pavement-standers in Downing Street or wherever must pretend to omniscience, even though they've spent so long on the end of a live-link that they've had no chance to discover anything much beyond where the nearest loo may be.

What's happened is that we have a dynamic in news now that is less about uncovering things than it is about covering them. It doesn't matter whether it's a war in Lebanon or floods in Doncaster, it doesn't really exist until there's a reporter there in flak jacket or wellingtons, going live.

My point is that there comes a point where the frenzy has to be put to one side, the rolling story halted, so that we can make sense of things. Television journalism's justification should be the justification of journalism through the ages: to inquire, to explain and to hold to account. The news may have been dull, but it was respected because it made sense of the day. That involved people assessing, filtering, separating the froth from what mattered. It was, in short, the exercise of clear judgment. And in return, it demanded - and got - the trust of the audience.

I did think about ending this lecture with a list of possible initiatives. The invention of a Viewers' Commissioner, a professional body with a clear code of practice. In the end, though, those things are secondary. What's really needed is a much clearer sense of leadership.

There is a clear anxiety that both parliament and television are sliding into irrelevance, disappearing into the mists of history like the quill pen and the coffee house. The web, we're told, makes expensive, professional broadcasting a thing of the past. But the problem with blogs is the same as their strength: they don't operate by conventional journalistic rules about checking facts, and they're unencumbered by any thought that there might be more than one side to a story. Rather than making an attempt at fairness irrelevant, it seems to me it actually makes it more necessary.

The more profound problem is really about demographics. The audience is getting older and we don't know what to do about it, so we have the spectacle of a bunch of middle-aged people in the grip of some comb-over compulsion. Youth. Where is it? Why doesn't it watch us? How do we get hold of it? This is the great motive force in contemporary television. Why do they want to find it? The motive is the same everywhere. Money.

The anxiety about irrelevance expresses itself in obsessions with the red button, with interactivity, fatuous opinion polls, podcasts - we've all heard the jargon, even if we're not entirely clear what it means. In the process, something's gone wrong. We've got too interested in the way we deliver what we do, at the expense of what we deliver. We have become obsessed with how the copper wire is organised, and forgotten about the electricity.

But where is this restatement of what television is for to come from? Well, the obvious place is the BBC, precisely because of its privileged position. And it is disappointing that the BBC Trust so far appears to consider its job to be more to do with chastising the senior management than with preaching a higher social purpose for the organisation.

Of course, the BBC's got problems of its own, and they also come down to money. It was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the Treasury in the last licence fee settlement, so that it is now committed to spending nearly £1.5bn on things - the cost of digital switchover, on-demand, building office blocks in Salford - that have nothing much to do with sole purpose of its existence, which is to produce worthwhile programmes.

Even so, quite how these obligations produce a budget crisis in an organisation with an assured income of £3.5bn is still something of a mystery to me. On Newsnight, for example, over the past three years we've been required to make budget cuts of 15%. We have lost producers, researchers and reporters. We cannot make the films we once made. Now we're told we're likely to have to more cuts: at least a further 20% over five years. It is unsustainable. To get a single - important - film transmitted last week involved surviving a sustained barrage of astonishingly threatening lawyers' letters from Carter Ruck and ear-bending from one of the country's most expensive PR firms. You can't do that if you're replacing grizzled output editors with people on work experience, no matter how enthusiastic they may be.

I'm sorry if this sounds like special pleading - no show has a God-given right to continue indefinitely. But the bigger question is whether the BBC itself has a future. Working for it has always been a bit like living in Stalin's Russia, with one five-year-plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another. One BBC, Making it Happen, Creative Futures, they all blur into one great vacuous blur. I can't even recall what the current one is.

I don't want to be apocalyptic, on the basis of what may turn out to be short-term problems. But it is foolish to be too confident on that score. I guess there'll be one more licence fee settlement. But can we be certain there'll be a fourth? Or a fifth? The idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s. The BBC is going to have to justify its existence not by the way it broadcasts or the buildings out of which it works, but by what it broadcasts. We seem, far too often, to lose sight of this. There is a fight going on for the survival of quality television right across this industry. As an industry we need to lay out much more clearly what we're doing and why. Let's spend less time measuring audiences and more time enlightening them.

Despite the past few months, I do not believe that this uniquely powerful medium has been taken over by charlatans. But we ought to acknowledge that parts of it are in danger of losing their redeeming virtues. We need to be open. We need to admit it when we make mistakes. We need treat our viewers with respect, to be frank with them about how and why programmes were made, to be transparent.

We need, in short, to rediscover a sense of purpose.

· This is an edited extract from the MacTaggart lecture delivered at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh international television festival last night